Task for Last Session
For our last task we will make it easy or maybe not so easy. During our seminar we talked about many different fields of research and many different theories and ideas that were certainly new to most of you. In the end of a seminar like ours there is always one question that arises: What is the applicability of all these ideas, theories, and methods? That is the question I would like to give to you for our final blog task and we will also discuss it in our last session.
stkruege
February 7th, 2010 at 18:38
If I understood the question correctly, I’d say that there is not THE method or theory that has to be applied by all of us. Everyone has to find out for himself which kind of research is best for him. As we found out, literature is individual, so also the dealings with literature depend on individual decisions.
But what impressed me a lot was how powerfully some texts are or can be influenced by autobiographical facts. Of, course, texts often include biographical particulars but I did not think that one can find out so much about a single text just by knowing a lot about his author. I am for example referring to the “yellow wallpaper” and its impact on Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Furthermore, I think that the facts about the epochs or about other fields that we got from all the slides helped me/us to cope with many of the texts or peoms.
Besides, I was never really interested in working with poems. For me, there was no deeper sense in it, but while studying them more intensively in our sessions, I started to like them more and more because the ideas that came up while we were discussing were really varied and became interesting. They wouldn’t have come up to my mind on my own, I think.
So at last I want to underline it once more that there exist several possibilities to deal with literature and for each person there might be a different one which he considers to be the best.
I hope, this was waht you meant by your question. I was not really sure..
February 7th, 2010 at 19:59
In my opinion the applicability of all these ideas, theories, and methods we learned in the sessions, is very individual. I think, that everyone learned something different or derive advantage from this course.
I have to say, that I’m not really interested in the topic poems, short stories and so on. But I really liked the method we worked on that topics in our sessions. The course helped me working with that stuff and I began to see the positive sides about poems. It is still not easy for me to interpret a poem without some troubles, but it gets better.
I really liked and enjoyed the sessions about the novel “A raisin in the sun” and the speech from Martin Luther King, because I’m very interested in the topic about black people, there history and there position in the society.
The sessions about comics and graphic novels was quite new for me. I never talked about such a topic in school or so. But it was very interesting, because it is a good topic to talk about with young people in school. It is very applicatively to use in school.
The most important thing is, that the course has impart, that literature is something indivdual, everyone can have his own attitude and see literature through his own eyes.
February 8th, 2010 at 12:53
One of the first things that I learned in school was that one should never ask for the apllicabiltiy of the things one has to learn just because of the immense bull**** that one has go through. Well, in this course it was of course different though much of the stuff we have dealt with has already been familiar to me, like the topic of poems. In that I case, I would have liked to deal a little bit with modern poetry and not only with very old examples. Maybe we could have compared the old with modern poetry in order to find similarities or differences…
But also the comic and the culture lesson were very interesting and “new” to me so that now, for instance, I know that if I see drunk girls liying on the floor I know that they are probably british
February 8th, 2010 at 20:25
First of all I have to support the (already given) opinion that the applicability of all the things we worked with is very individual. I think that it depends on how much interest the different topics arouse in the students and how much everyone worked on them. But all in all I think that everyone learned a lot of things. We dealt with a lot of different types of literature and – even though probably everyone already talked about some of them in school- found a lot of new aspects and ways of dealing with them. We talked about different ways of interpreting or analyzing texts or e.g. putting literature in the right cultural context or the right age. I think that these methods are always useful and always help you to a better understanding. Also things like rhetoric devices, aspects of time and so on are always useful und support your competence and performance. On top of that a lot of texts we worked with were very interesting, e.g. “The Yellow Wallpaper” or “A Raisin In The Sun” and I guess that I would have never read them if not in this course
February 9th, 2010 at 18:52
I agree with most of the things that were already mentioned. I think that everyone has to find his or her own way to deal with all these theories and methods. In the course we talked about so many different kinds of literature and so many different topics, like poetry, culture or comics, that we could only get a rough overview. We learned that there are some theories and ideas and how they work. But when one really wants to use them and work with them, everyone has to pick out the things he or she needs. So I also think that the applicability of all these ideas, theories and methods is very individual.
February 9th, 2010 at 19:41
I think that all the things I´ve learned about, all the ideas, theories and methods give me a good fundament to base on. So later when I`ve to deal especially with short stories or poems the access will be easier for me, because I have some knowledge to base on. Moreover I`ve learned that with a defined method you can get an entrance to almost every text there is, even if it`s a poem from the middle ages. What I although liked was the coverage of the texts we dealed with, from shakespeare to the watchmen. And that comics can deliver a certain message in the same way as poems or plays can do.
February 9th, 2010 at 22:37
I agree with the statment of “Ischweri”, that there is not THE method or theorie to analyse texts.I think every text is different from another,even if they have the same genre. So you have to find out which method is the best in the different cases. And for me, not every method was as easy as the other, espacually if we had to apply the metohds or theories on different kinds of texts or stories.
But in general I think the perspectives and methods we looked different texts and genres up with, are very helpful. So you can see a short story, for example, not only as a story but also you can find a message, the author maybe wants to convey.
February 10th, 2010 at 12:27
At the end of this semester I think I learned much from you because many of the things you teached I had not heared before or I just forgot it. Especially the different theories of analysing poetry sounded kind of new to me.
I think that all these theories only show us that there this no perfect complete theorie. Diffrent Theories only focuss on different aspects so one explains these questions better than others and other theories explains those aspects better.
So just like “jhartmann” wrote: there is no perfect method you have to decide from case to case new which you want to use.
February 10th, 2010 at 17:24
I must say as well that I have learned much from you, although I was familiar with lots of subjects. You have brought up many information to my mind again
In addition, it was very helpful that you dig deeper when you ask questions and we give answers. This just proved that every theory could be wrong or right. It depends on the arguments one gives in order to support the theory. I also like the fact we just “touch on” all the subjects like poetry, comics etc, because it gives a general survey which is very important, since at first, one should not learn the full details of a domain. That is why I would say that this is good basis for all of us.